Steve Chapman: Maintain our liberties and take our chances

According
to a 19th century composer named Francis Scott Key, the United States is the
“land of the free and the home of the brave.” If he were writing those lyrics
today, he might add an asterisk with the notation: “Void in the aftermath of
terrorism.”

In the
wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, many people resolved not to let
themselves be terrorized. It’s obviously impossible to secure every inch of a
26.2-mile race course, but so what? Boston is not going to be scared into
giving it up.

A spirit
of bold defiance was exactly right, sending mass murderers the message: You can
kill some of us, but you can’t kill us all, and you can’t frighten us from
living our lives as free people.

But as in
past episodes, that reaction was not universal, particularly in Washington.
Sometimes, the preferred view is: Make us safe, no matter what the price.

Following
the 9/11 attacks, the government went so far as to classify American citizens
as “enemy combatants” and strip them of constitutional protections. Some 1,200
other people living here were secretly arrested and jailed. We invaded Iraq
fearing it had weapons of mass destruction that might be used against us.

In
retrospect, it’s clear the administration overreacted again and again. It was
hardly the first to do so: During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt interned
120,000 Japanese-Americans. Not until 1988 did Congress apologize for mistakes
caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

That
regrettable experience did not inoculate us against hysterical responses. Fear
doesn’t always strike out.

An
essential feature of free, democratic societies is to respect fundamental
liberties even if they may impede the quest for absolute safety. We uphold the
Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches even though it lets some
criminals get away. We maintain the Second Amendment right to keep and bear
arms even though some gun owners commit crimes.

But
terrifying events can warp our judgment, as the Boston Marathon bombings did.
Republican senators urged that the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, be
designated an enemy combatant so he could be detained without charges and
interrogated at length without a lawyer.

Others
wanted the administration to use a “public safety” exception to avoid reading
him his Miranda rights until he could be questioned to the FBI’s content —
something permitted under a corrosive 2010 policy adopted by President Barack
Obama’s Justice Department.

The
administration ultimately rejected both options, possibly because it feared
being overruled by the courts for violating the clear commands of the
Constitution. But the advocates are not scrupulous about such obligations. They
believe those have to be curbed to defuse dangers our shortsighted founders didn’t
foresee.

But they
did. They just weren’t willing to put public security above individual rights.
“Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national
conduct,” warned Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. “Even the most
ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates.”

The
willingness to trample on rights rests on the dream of being utterly immune to
our enemies. That fantasy was behind the invasion of Iraq, a faraway country
with a puny military that posed no threat to the United States. It manifested a
stubborn national impulse.

‘‘For
more than two centuries, America has aspired to a condition of perfect safety
from foreign threats,” wrote James Chace and Caleb Carr in their 1988 book, America
Invulnerable. But every time we complete a major effort to attain that
security, we have “found ourselves exposed to a new array of foreign threats.”
The safer we are, the more we yearn for protection.

The same
holds for terrorism, foreign or homegrown. Americans are amazingly safe from
these attacks, which are rare and getting rarer.

But as we
grow more secure, our tolerance for any remaining risk, or even any potential
risk, gets smaller.

It’s a
losing game. We can’t reduce the risk to zero no matter what we do. So we might
as well maintain our liberties, muster our courage and take our chances.

STEVE CHAPMAN’S column is distributed by
Creators Syndicate Inc.

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